Notes

The woodcut (fig. 5) cannot be strictly regarded as a life portrait,
since it was undoubtedly based on a daguerreotype — either the “McKee” daguerreotype (fig. 3) or a variant plate produced at the same sitting. Both daguerreotypes are now unlocated.

The Osgood portrait was painted probably at the suggestion of the artist’s wife, while the
two daguerreotypes by Pratt (fig. 22 and fig. 23) were produced at the
insistence of the photographer himself. The “Annie,” “Stella,” “Ultima Thule,” and
“Daly” daguerreotypes (fig. 20, fig. 21, fig. 14, and fig. 12) each appear to have been taken at the request of Poe’s
acquaintances, while the “McKee” daguerreotype and the watercolor by A. C. Smith seem to have been commissioned
specifically for reproduction in contemporary periodicals.

Prof. James A. Harrison, in his edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 17 vols.
(New York: George D. Sproul, 1902), 1:70, disputes the accuracy of this description, calling Poe’s hair black and his
complexion dark olive. Harrison does not explain how Poe could have falsified his enlistment document in the presence of the
attending surgeon who endorsed it, but his impressions of Poe’s physical appearance seem to be derived from a description given by Mary Starr Jenning, published in Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine for Mar. 1889.

There is some disagreement as to the exact color of Poe’s eyes. Most firsthand descriptions
give them as either grey or hazel; J. M. Daniel, however, noted that they “seemed to be dark grey; but on closer
examination, they appeared in that neutral violet tint, which is so difficult to define” ([Daniel], “Edgar Allan
Poe,” p. 179). Marie Louise Shew remembered them as “blue eyes with dark lashes, or bluish grey” (quoted in
Miller, ed., Poe Biography, p. 121). Susan A. T. Weiss described them as “large, with long, jet, black lashes,—
the iris dark steel-gray, possessing a crystalline clearness and transparency” (Weiss, “The Last Days of Edgar A.
Poe,” Scribner’s Monthly15 [Mar. 1878]:707-16).

Quoted in Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols. (New York:
George H. Doran, 1926), 1:350-51. A large number of descriptions, including Latrobe’s, mention Poe’s habit of dressing
entirely in black (“not a particle of white was visible,” remembered Latrobe). This assertion, ­[page 176:] however, may stem more from Poe’s posthumous reputation as a writer
of the macabre than from any clear recollection of the man himself — his extant portraits depict him arrayed in a variety of
colors. The Osgood canvas, for example, portrays him wearing a chestnut-colored frock coat and a green cravat; in the Smith
watercolor he wears a buff-colored vest; two daguerreotypes taken six years apart (fig. 3 and fig. 17) depict him attired in a light-colored greatcoat.

The portraits referred to here are the “Inman” likeness (fig.
50) and the painting attributed to James Eddy (q.v.). In the case of the Eddy portrait, the
painting’s appraised worth of $7, 000 to $12, 000 was far more than the actual value of the picture, but only a fraction of
what would today be commanded by a Poe portrait of indisputable authenticity.

Stedman’s comment is found in an undated memorandum to George Woodberry, now preserved in the
Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The daguerreotype was used as the frontispiece to vol. 6 of Stedman and Woodberry,
eds., Works.

McKee’s letter was sold at an auction of Stedman’s library and is presently unlocated;
see the sales catalogue, The Library . . . of Edmund Clarence Stedman (New York: Anderson Galleries, Jan. 24-25,
1911), lot 2295. A paraphrase of the letter appeared in Stedman and Woodberry, eds., Works, 10:260.

The daguerreotype was described in the Anderson Galleries sale catalogue, Catalogue of the
Library of the Late Thomas J. McKee, Part VIII (New York: Feb. 20-21, 1905), p. 1238: “[Lot] 7747 POE, (EDGAR ALLAN).
Original Daguerreotype Portrait. 12mo, half length, with light-colored overcoat thrown back from the shoulders. In oval frame,
with case (covers detached).” The original Anderson Galleries sales records are currently held by Sotheby’s, New York.
However, these files appear to be incomplete; a cursory search of them in 1986 yielded no additional information regarding the
present whereabouts of the “McKee” daguerreotype.

The watercolor was first reproduced as the frontispiece to the Anderson Galleries sale catalogue,
Rarities in English Literature . . . from the Library of a New York Collector (New York, Feb. 6, 1920). It was
reproduced a second time in Ichigoro Uchida’s “A. C. Smith’s Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe in the Huntington,
” in Collected Essays, No. 28 (Tokyo: Kyoritsu Junior College, Feb. 1985).

The essay was eventually written by James Russell Lowell, sometime after May 1844. See Poe to
Lowell, May 28, 1844, in Ostrom, ed., Letters, 1:253-54. [[Text of this letter: Poe to J. R. Lowell, May 28, 1844 (LTR-175).]] ­[page 177:]

The Philadelphia city directory for 1844 gives Smith’s address as 86 Chestnut Street, a short
distance from the offices of Graham’s Magazine. Smith’s portrait of Poe was cropped sometime before 1870, but
it originally depicted the poet seated in what appeared to be an office chair of the period — a fact first observed by E. C.
Stedman in his and Woodberry’s edition of Poe’s Works, 10:262. The style of the chair, coupled with
Smith’s proximity to the offices of Graham’s, suggests the portrait was painted in the magazines suite.

Osgood was presumably introduced to Poe by his wife, Frances Sargent Osgood, who did not make
Poe’s acquaintance until Mar. 1845, when they met at the Astor House in New York City. Samuel Osgood may not have been
living in New York between 1847 and 1849 — see Anna Wells Rutledge, ed., The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
1807-1870: Cumulative Record of Exhibition Catalogues (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1955), p. 156, which
gives his address during those years as Walnut Street, above 8th, Philadelphia.

No full account of Osgood’s life has yet been written; the statement quoted, and most of the
biographical data which follow, are taken from B. B. Thatcher’s “Lines in the Life of an Artist,” in The
Boston Book, Being Specimens of Metropolitan Literature (Boston: Light & Horton, 1836), pp. 253-64. Here Osgood’s
name is never given in full, but he is identified on p. 256 as “Sam” and on p. 264 as “Osgood.” References
to dates, locations, and several portraits by the artist — particularly those of Martin Van Buren and Sir Isaac Coffin
— make the identification quite unmistakable. See also H. W. French’s Art and Artists in Connecticut (Boston:
Shepard & Lee, 1879) p. 60, which is highly unreliable as to dates; also Eben Putnam and Ira Osgood, A Genealogy of the
Descendants of John, Christopher, and William Osgood (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press, 1894), pp. 191-92.

See, for example, H. F. Harrington, “Poe Not to Be Apotheosized,” The Critic,
n.s., 4 (Oct. 3, 1885):157-58. John Evangelist Walsh, in his Plumes in the Dust (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), advances the
ludicrous notion that Poe was the illegitimate father of Mrs. Osgood’s second child, Fanny Fay. Walsh’s assertion that
the Osgood portrait was copied from the “Whitman” daguerreotype (fig. 17) is equally
baseless, but was apparently contrived to support his theory concerning Fanny Fay’s paternity.

See the sale catalogue, Books from the Library of the Late Frederic R. Halsey and Other
Collections (New York: Anderson Galleries, Feb. 17-19, 1919), p. 194, lot 789; Thomas O. Mabbott, ed., “The Letters of
George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 26 (Mar. 1922):195n.

Spirit of the Times, a Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage 14 (Dec. 21, 1844), p.
516. I am indebted to Robin Bolton-Smith, Associate Curator at the National Museum of Art, Washington, D.C., for calling my
attention to this article.

This according to a note prefixed to “Portraits and Autographs of Edgar Allan Poe,” a
unique, handprinted volume now preserved at the Huntington Library. Also see the American Art Association sale catalogue, The
Augustin Daly Collection, Part III (New York, Mar. 28-29, 1900) lot 5015.

Anderson Galleries sale catalogue, The Collection of the Late Peter Gilsey (New York, Mar.
18, 1903), p. 287. The daguerreotype is catalogued as follows: “[Lot] 2414 POE (EDGAR ALLAN). Original Daguerreotype
Portrait, accompanied by a photograph made from it. 12mo. Very fine. (As one piece.) The reproduction was made for Mr.
Gilsey’s private use.” An annotated copy of the catalogue, in the Pattee Library, states that the daguerreotype was
purchased by an order bid submitted before the sale, making it unlikely the buyer’s name was announced during the auction.

Mrs. LeDuc’s note, which is now bound into a volume containing an autograph letter from Poe
to her father, Prof. C. P. Bronson, is essentially a paraphrase of her 1860 reminiscence for the Home Journal: “I had
taken a child’s fancy for making a collection of Dagguerotypes [sic] of living Poets and asked Poe to sit for one for me
which he did about the same time the note [from Poe to Prof. Bronson] was written, and this picture was said by both Mrs. Clem
[Clemm] and the Poet to be the most life like of any that had ever been made. It is certainly the best I have ever seen —
both picture and note have been in my possession ever since” (W. H. Koester Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research
Center, University of Texas at Austin.)

Phillips published the likeness in Poe: The Man (1:553) with the highly misleading caption
“From a photograph owned by Mrs. E. A. Poe, given family by John P. Kennedy, Esq.” The “Mrs. E. A. Poe”
mentioned by Phillips was not Virginia Clemm Poe but a distant relative by marriage. The photograph owned by John P. Kennedy was
not the original “Daly” daguerreotype but evidently a carte-de-visite reproduction. The retouched copy photograph used
in Phillips’s book is now in the Koester Collection at the University of Texas at Austin; it is inscribed on the verso.
“Edgar Allan Poe from photo of picture owned by Mr. Kennedy and given family of Poe. ­[page 179:] Courtesy of Mrs. Edgar Allan Poe, Baltimore, Md., 1918.”

Whether the overdose was deliberate or accidental is still a matter of debate among Poe scholars,
although Poe himself, in a letter to Annie L. Richmond, stated emphatically that it was deliberate. See Ostrom, ed.,
Letters, 2:400-403. [[Text of this letter: Poe to Mrs. A. L. Richmond, November 16, 1848 (LTR-286).]]

Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols.. (New York: George H.
Doran, 1926), 2:782. Allen mistook the “Stella” daguerreotype (fig. 21) for the
“Ultima Thule” daguerreotype and reproduced it as such in Israfel, 2:facing 779.

Most early daguerreotype cameras (though not all) produced laterally reversed images of the sitter;
in the making of a copy daguerreotype, the mirror-reversal effect would be redoubled, producing a visually correct image. The fact
that these four versions of the “Ultima Thule” image bear an identical abrasion implies that all four were based on a
common ancestor.

The postscript to Mrs. Whitman’s letter of Mar. 4, 1874, to John Ingram refers to a
lithograph, probably Perrassin’s, made from “the original daguerre . . . in 1857 or 1858” (Miller,
ed., Poe’s Helen, pp. 59-60). However, Mrs. Whitman’s own copy of the Perrassin lithograph, now preserved at
the John Hay Library, Brown University, is accompanied by a note, apparently recent, stating that it was drawn about 1869 from a
painting by John Arnold (1834-1909).

Miller, ed., Poe’s Helen, p. 94. In a letter to Ingram two years later, the elderly
Mrs. Whitman retracted all of her earlier statements concerning the date of the sitting, remarking, “I am now convinced that
I must have been mistaken as to the time. . . . & now I feel sure that it was on his next visit to
Providence, early in December [1848], that this second Providential portrait was taken” (pp. 382-83). However, the
reasoning behind Mrs. Whitman’s retraction is vague, and her overall statement has the ring of an afterthought. Since Poe
wears nearly identical garments in both the “Whitman” and “Ultima Thule” daguerreotypes, it seems likely
the two images were indeed taken within days of each other, in mid-November 1848, as Mrs. Whitman had originally asserted.

A clipping from the Providence Daily Journal, dated only 1847, is now preserved in the John
Hay Library at Brown University. It reads: “Mr. M[asury] is not connected with any other Daguerreotype rooms in this city,
and would be happy to see his friends at his new rooms, directly opposite the Post Office, 19 Westminster St.” On the same
page, Hartshorn countered with an advertisement reading: “HARTSHORN’S (late Masury & Co.’s) Gallery of
Colored Miniatures, is still in successful operation at 25 Market St., second story.” City directories show that by the time
of Poe’s visits to Providence both men were back in business at 25 Westminster Street. About 1850 Masury again left
Hartshorn, reopening his studio at 19 Westminster Street. ­[page 180:]

John Henry Ingram, ed., The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black,
1874-75), 1:frontispiece. Ingram’s preface (1:vii) states: “[The] portrait prefixed to the present volume — the
first engraved port. of Edgar Poe worthy of that name — is taken from a photograph in my possession, by Messrs. Coleman and
Remington. The photograph is acknowledged by Poe’s personal acquaintances to be an excellent likeness, and has been
faithfully reproduced by the engraver.”

The photograph and a paraphrase of its inscription were published in the May 1897 issue of The
Bookman (5:209). The photograph was owned at that time by Walter Leon Sawyer of Boston, a children’s book author, who
presumably received it from Annie Richmond or a member of her family.

Mrs. Lewis’s comments are contained in two letters of John Ingram to Sarah Whitman,
respectively dated Sept. 4 and Nov. 30, 1874 (see Miller, ed., Whitman’s June 2, 1875, letter to Ingram, in which she
obliquely refers to Mrs. Lewis’s daguerreotype as having been made “six months” after one of the two plates
known to have been taken in Providence in mid-November 1848 (p. 301).

The Lowell directories were published biennially, leaving us with only a fragmented view of that
city’s daguerreotype trade. The eight Lowell daguerreotypists whose names have been ascertained are: George C. Gilchrest (or
Gilchrist), William S. Gove, Benson C. Hazelton (or Hazeltine), Samuel P. Howes, M. Morton Peake, James and Timothy Pearson, and
Andrew J. Simpson. See The Lowell Directory and Almanac for 1847 (Lowell: Oliver March, 1847) and The Lowell Directory
and Business Key, for 1849 (Lowell: Oliver March, 1849).

Mrs. Richmond’s use of the word artist may be telling, for at least one Lowell
daguerreotypist was precisely that: Samuel P. Howes (d. 1881) was active not only as a photographer but also as a professional
portrait painter and miniaturist. He seems to have begun his career in Boston, where he worked as an artist between 1829 and 1835;
in 1837 he continued his trade in nearby Lowell. Approximately ten years later he opened a daguerreotype studio on Merrimack
Street, maintaining it until 1856. In 1857-60 he was active as a photographer in San Francisco, but before 1870 returned to Lowell
to resume his career as a portrait painter. The Lowell city directory for 1875-76 describes him merely as an “artist”
with a studio at 112 Merrimack Street — the same address he had occupied when Poe visited Lowell three decades earlier.

George C. Gilchrest also seems a likely candidate for authorship of the “Annie” and
“Stella” daguerreotypes. Evidently the most successful daguerreotypist in Lowell, Gilchrest was able to maintain a
career as a photographer for some thirty years after these unusually skillful likenesses were taken — long after his peers
had abandoned the field for other professions. City directories show that in 1849 he operated a daguerreotype parlor at 82
Merrimack Street; in the 1875-76 directory he is described as a “photographist” working at 92 Merrimack Street and
residing in Centralville, a Lowell suburb.

Two other daguerreotypists are worthy of consideration here. Andrew J. Simpson and James M. Pearson
both operated studios in Lowell during the late 1840s; both were still living there in the mid-1870s, ­[page 181:] when Mrs. Richmond opened her correspondence with John Ingram. By that
time, however, Simpson had given up photography for a trade in “music and musical instruments”; Pearson, a grocer, may
have abandoned the craft as early as 1848 and probably not later than 1850. See The Lowell Directory 1875-76 (Lowell:
Joshua Merrill & Son, 1875); Ichigoro Uchida, “The Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe Taken in New England in 1848,
” offprint from Collected Essays, No. 25 (Tokyo: Kyoritsu Junior College, Feb. 1982), pp. 1-4, 13; Rinhart, The
American Daguerreotype, pp. 392, 396, 409.

Shortly after visiting Mrs. Pierce’s residence, Joyce wrote from aboard his private railway
car that he “could not resist” the daguerreotype of Poe, and immediately instructed one of his aides to send Mrs.
Pierce $500 for the plate, plus $2500 for eleven original watercolors by John James Audubon (Letter of D. G. Joyce to Mr.
Leffingwell, Dec. 4, 1920, courtesy of John J. Hanzel, Hanzel Galleries, Chicago). See also Photographica 5 (Oct. 1973):5,
citing a June 1920 letter from Mrs. Pierce.

Although there is no firm documentation on this point, it has been traditionally assumed that Poe
intended the daguerreotype as a gift for Mrs. Lewis. It is equally possible, however, that the Lewises obtained the daguerreotype
from Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, who was a frequent guest in the Lewis household during the late 1840s and early
1850s.

Cavalier, American Castles, pp. 115-17. The castle was demolished in 1957. The legend that
Poe sometimes stayed as a guest here is whimsy; the castle was not built until 1853, four years after Poe’s death. For an
engraved illustration of Pratt’s daguerreotype gallery, see the Photographic Art-Journal 2 (Oct. 1851):235;
reproduced as a “rare old print” in Phillips, Poe: The Man, 2:1450.

“We are indebted to Messrs. Sanxay & Chalmers, the successors of W. A. Pratt in his well
known Richmond Daguerrean Gallery, for an excellent Daguerreotype ­[page 182:] of the late Edgar Allan Poe. . . . The likeness is very perfect, and as the only
accurate one in existence of the greatest genius of his time, possesses a great value. At the very moment it was handed to us, we
were reading of the movement on foot in New York to build a monument to Poe, who lies in the Fayette street burial-ground, at
Baltimore, without a mark to designate his grave” ([Thompson], “The Editor’s Table,” p. 395).

It has sometimes been stated, quite erroneously, that Poe himself presented the daguerreotype to
Mrs. Shelton. William A. Pratt’s statements, as quoted in the Century Magazine, o.s., 50 (June 1895):315-16, make it
certain that this was not the case.

Repeated efforts to locate the portrait since 1981 have been unsuccessful. That the portrait
remained in the society’s collections until at least 1966 is indicated by the letter from Lindenbusch cited in n. 41, above.

Anderson Galleries sale catalogue, Library of . . . Edmund Clarence Stedman, Part
III (New York, Jan. 24-25, 1911), lot 2289. At that time the replica carried a penciled note from Stedman: “This copy
was made for me E. C. Stedman in March 1896 by the said Gabriel Harrison now surviving & in his 78th year.”

This was a reprint of the four-volume Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, published in
London by John C. Nimmo in 1884. The Nimmo edition did not carry the Chifflart likeness; in its place was an etching by Ben
Damman, evidently derived from the “Stella” daguerreotype (fig. 21).

Ostrom, ed., Letters, 1:83-85. [[Text of this letter: Poe to J. P. Kennedy, February 11,
1836 (LTR-057).]] The painting was not a likeness of Poe but of Kennedy,
accompanied by his wife and sister-in-law.

Thomas Sully did at one time paint a portrait of Poe’s mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe; this
fact was first observed by Dr. Bruce V. English in his article “Poe and the Sullys,” in the Poe Messenger 14
(Summer 1984):2-5. It seems somewhat doubtful, however, that this miniature is the one now owned by the Free Library of
Philadelphia. See n. 117, below.

Edward Biddle and Mantle Fielding, The Life and Works of Thomas Sully (Philadelphia:
Wickersham Press, 1921), p. 249. The authenticity of the well-known miniature of Poe’s mother, now in the Gimbel Collection
at the Free Library of Philadelphia, is questionable — at least as a life portrait. The miniature first came to light in
1875, in the possession of Marie Louise Shew (then Mrs. Roland Houghton), who later forwarded it to John H. Ingram in London. In
an Apr. 1875 letter to Ingram, Mrs. Houghton stated that the portrait was a copy, made by herself, after a lost original formerly
owned by Poe. See Miller, ed., Poe Biography, pp. 131-32.

Typewritten memorandum dated July 7, 1949, titled “Likenesses of Poe,” Valentine
Museum. Wilson’s comments are in the form of marginal notations in pencil. The notations are unsigned but were evidently
written in response to a July 1949 query letter from Mrs. Ralph Catterall, curator of the Valentine Museum.

In Facts about Poe (p. 50), Amanda Schulte, after describing the Boyle painting at length,
concluded that “this portrait though differing in expression from most of the pictures of Poe has his characteristics,
except for a slightly firmer chin. . . . There seems to be no reason to doubt its authenticity.”
Schulte’s pronouncement is baffling: the provenance of the painting is hopelessly vague and the likeness itself bears not
the slightest resemblance to the authenticated images of Poe.

Undated clipping in a scrapbook of Poe ephemera, ca. 1923, in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach
Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. See also Phillips, Poe:
The Man, 1:291.

“Of the Artist, E. C. Lewis, nothing is known further than that there was an Artist, Painter
of Portraits, but not of much repute, who resided in Philadelphia, contemporary with Poe” (S. V. Henkels & Son sale
catalogue no. 1013, lot 31, undated clipping in a scrapbook of Poe ephemera, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and
Photographs).

In her May 2, 1875, letter to Ingram (note 3, above), Mrs. Houghton stated that Poe’s letter
to his wife was preserved in his “deguerotype.” The letter remained in Mrs. Houghton’s care until about 1875,
when she apparently sent the original, followed by a transcript copy, to Ingram in London. But Ingram would later assert that he
had received only the copy, not the original, and the present whereabouts of this singularly valuable letter remain unknown. For
the letter’s text, see Ostrom, ed., Letters, 2:318. [[Text of this letter: Poe to Mrs. V. C. Poe, June 12, 1846 (LTR-232).]]

A Society’s Chief Joys (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, 1969), p. 87. Here the daguerreotype is mistakenly
attributed to S. W. Hartshorn and is described as having been a gift from Sarah H. Whitman to Mr. and Mrs. Lewin.

Kingsley’s original letter to Miss Greene is unlocated at present. Handwritten extracts,
however, were made during the 1950s by Beaumont Newhall and are preserved in the files of the George Eastman House, Rochester.

Mrs. Whitman seems to refer to the picture in one of her letters to Miss Robins, promising,
“I will send you the daguerre or a photograph from it very soon” (Whitman to Robins, Apr. 26, [1861], Elizabeth Robins
Papers, Fales Library, New York University).

The daguerreotype manufacturers J. M. L. and W. H. Scovill did not adopt the trademark
“SCOVILL MFG. CO. EXTRA” until 1850, and evidently abandoned it after 1854. See Floyd and Marion Rinhart, The
American Daguerreotype (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1981), p. 425.